IBS Journal May 2018 EDITOR’S NOTE GENDER INEQUALITY IS STILL A MASSIVE PROBLEM


UK ORGANISATIONS HAVE HAD TO REVEAL WHAT THEIR PAY GAPS ARE – AND THE MAJORITY SHOULD BE ASHAMED THAT WOMEN ARE STILL LAGGING BEHIND THEIR MALE CONTEMPORARIES IN PAY AND BONUSES.


Bill Boyle Senior Editor


billb@ibsintelligence.com


05


W


e tackle a number of profound issues for the banking tech world in this issue of IBS Journal. We have examined in depth, on pages 8 and 9, the gender pay gap which the UK Government is belatedly tackling at the moment by forcing all UK organisations to reveal what their own pay gap is. The figures make uncomfortable reading for anyone who thought that gender prejudice was dying out.


The smallest gap of the large banks was, maybe not surprisingly, at the Co-op bank which had 22.6%, also the closest to the national average across all organisations. Barclays bank has the largest gap followed by Lloyds. All have answers as to why these gaps are so high – but can they really be justified in the 21st Century? And can the difference between the bonuses women get and the bonuses received by their male counterparts really be defended at all?


The challenger banks don’t come out of the gender pay gap much better than the more established institutions, but our analysis covers that and the situation within the supplier community. The situation is not a simple clear-cut one and one which must be handled sensitively or the real message – that we still have a long way to go but are tackling it – will be missed entirely.


Artificial intelligence is playing a more prominent role in analytics and on page 13, Nageswar Cherukupalli, vice president of Infosys, takes a deep dive into where he thinks this approach will be most useful. He says: “When democracies face an unprecedented threat, a common reaction is to form a government of national unity. If we are serious about predicting and thus avoiding the next Great Recession, we need to take the same approach.”


There were, he points out, many prophets of doom prior to the 2008 financial crash; however, all were ignored because a more optimistic scenario was being painted on a bigger canvas. It was not until the crash was over that some of these Job’s comforters became best-sellers.


But can we learn from this and use AI and analytics to crunch through the zettabytes of unstructured data that might just point to something nasty coming around the corner, a bit like the alligator in the swimming pool in The Big Short? I’m sure we’ll get round to analysing that when the time comes.


Also in this issue, we tackle one of the issues that I find is one of the most intractable across all hi-tech industries – getting buy-in from the Board. For many good reasons in the early days of hi-tech the staff running the budget-hungry IT departments found it hard to get the Board on-side when new kit was needed. Fairly quickly the big banks found out that they had to stay micro-seconds ahead of the trading competition at all times, However, up and down the banking world, there were always niches where the Board just could not be persuaded to make the investment that the staff running the core banking systems knew they needed expend to stay ahead.


On page 21 Tom Turner, CEO of BitSight, outlines why IT departments are seen as so different from the rest of the business and lists five simple guides for CTOs to follow when they are planning that big presentation to the Board about that next vital step into Open Banking and the world of APIs or the need to investigate Artificial Intelligence. Talk business benefits not convoluted synonyms Turner says. You know it makes sense.


www.ibsintelligence.com 5


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52